Sunnis and Shiites are rapidly separating in areas that were once mixed towns and neighborhoods. From the International Herald Tribune:
Baghdad - Abu Noor's town had become so hostile to Shiites that his wife had not left the house in a month, his family could no longer go to the medical clinic and mortar shells had been lobbed at the houses of two of his religious leaders. "I couldn't open the door and stand in my yard," he said. So when Abu Noor, a Shiite from Tarmiyah, a heavily Sunni Arab town north of here, ran into an old friend, a Sunni who faced his own problems in a Shiite district in Baghdad, the two decided to switch houses. They even shared a moving van.Two and a half years after the American invasion, deep divides that have long split Iraqi society have violently burst into full view. As the hatred between Sunni Arabs and Shiites hardens and the relentless toll of bombings and assassinations grows, families are leaving their mixed towns and cities for safer areas where they will not automatically be targets.
In doing so, they are creating increasingly polarized enclaves and redrawing the sectarian map of Iraq, especially in Baghdad and the cities around it.
The evidence is so far mostly anecdotal - the government is not tracking the moves. In a rough count, about 20 cities and towns around Baghdad are segregating, according to accounts by local sheiks, Iraqi nongovernmental organizations and military officials, and the families themselves.
Those areas are among the most mixed and the most violent in Iraq - according to the American military, 85 percent of attacks in the country are in four provinces including Baghdad, and two others to its north and west. The volatile sectarian mix is a holdover from the rule of Saddam Hussein, who gave favors to Sunni landowners in the lush farmland around Baghdad to reinforce loyalties and to protect against Shiites in the south. Shiites came to work the land, and sometimes to own it. Abu Noor moved to Tarmiyah in 1987 after the government gave land to his father.
"The most violent places are the towns and cities around Baghdad," said Sheik Jalal al-Dien al-Sagheer, a member of parliament from a religious Shiite party. "It was a circle. It was invented. It did not exist before."
The result has been carnage on a serious scale. In all, at least eight of Abu Noor's friends and close relatives, including a brother, have been killed since the beginning of 2004.
The motives for the attacks are often complicated. The complex webs of tribal affiliations and social status that rule everyday life in Iraq do not always line up as simply as Shiite against Sunni. But increasingly, despite the urging of some Shiite religious leaders and Sunni politicians, the attacks have been just that: A mostly Sunni Arab fringe is launching vicious attacks against civilians, often Shiites, while Shiite death squads are openly stalking Sunnis for revenge, and the Shiite-dominated government makes regular arrests in Sunni Arab neighborhoods...
The ME cavemen have shown over and over again that they can carry murderous grudges from grievances 1,000+ years ago. What makes people think that the Shiites will forget that only 2 years ago Sunni Saddam was forcing their sect through the meat grinder (literally). Retribution is to be expected and I'd think I'd be tempted to do the same.
20-20 hindsight wonders if the coalition forces should have let the Shiites take their retribution upon the Sunnis in the first months after the war?
Maybe there wouldn't be any many Sunnis to lead the anti-coalition forces today.
foursuvs:
According to Christopher Hitchens, Iraqi sectarianism isn't as simple and uncomplicated as much media coverage implies, as there has also been a lot of intermarriage between Arab and Kurd, Sunni and Shia. I also heard a doctor from Basra who was in the Czech Republic to learn advanced surgical techniques interviewed on Radio Prague complete frustrate the interviewer who wanted him to complain about how bad things have been since the invasion. The doctor just acknowledged the current violence and upheaval, held out hope for the future and repeatedly stated that the most important thing of all was that Saddam was gone, noting that there wasn't a family in Iraq, Sunni, Shia or Kurd, that hadn't lost family members to the regime.
It looks like civil war is inevitable. Perhaps a three-way sunni, shia and kurd split. Some pundits think this could draw turkey against the kurds. Further compications from iran are almost certain. I hope that the iraqi's can keep it together for thier own sake.
The Sunni-Shi'a split began in 661 A.D. The doctrine of taqiyya, which origiinates in Shi'a Islam, was a response to Sunni persecution. The Sunnis vary in how much they dislike or hate the Shi'a. Some hate them very much. In Pakistan, for years, the Shi'a have been subject to violent attack. The same happened in Afghanistan to the Shi'a Hazara when the Taliban imposed their rule, and their "purer" brand of Islam.
It is a mistake to suggest, as some may, that the Sunni-Shi'a split is somehow the fault of the Americans in Iraq. This is nonsense. Not only does the original split go back 1350 years and lead to all sorts of blood-letting, but the history of modern Iraq shows that the Sunnis were never willng to share power with the Shi'a. They may not have denounced them as Rafidite dogs. The Ba'athist Party that came to power nearly forty years ago was not for Sunnis only; its function, in fact, was to disguise Sunni Arab rule by allowing into its ranks whatever Shi'a, Kurds, Turcomans, or Christians wished to declare themselves Ba'athists; there were some of each.
Under Saddam Hussein, once his rule had been challenged by the Shi'a, mass murder followed. To have expected the memory of persecution and mass murder of Shi'a to somehow disappear ina general outburst of gratitude toward the Americans, is idiotic. To expect now, with all the Sunni bombs that have killed so many Shi'a, bombs set off by both Saddamite revanchists and from the outside Al-Qaeda Sunni supporters who cannot stand the idea that the Shi'a, those Rafidite dogs, for some Sunnis even worse than Western Infidels, could take over Iraq, that the Shi'a will not draw their own conclusions about the Sunnis, is absurd.
The history of modern Iraq has been rewritten to de-emphasize such things as the massacre of Assyrians in 1933, the Farhud against the Jews of Baghdad on June 1-2, 1941, the encroachments on the Shi'a, the arabization of Kurdish lands and the sunnization of Shi'a communities. Much has been made by Bernard Lewis, for example, of the "relatively" (or some such escape adverb) decent society under the Hashemite monarchs. But modern Iraq was always violent, and always based on rule by a Sunni Arab minority, and in Saddam Hussein's day a minority within that minority, that imposed its will. And that imposition was limited mainly by the primitive state of the means of control, which means were upgraded with oil revenues and what those revenues could buy.
Under Saddam Hussein things got much worse for everyone, and especially for the Kurds and the Shi'a. But that is not the same as maintaining that their travails began with him, or that Sunni-Shi'a relations were worsened by the American invasion. The Americans simply knocked over the despot, and allowed, through the ballot, the Shi'a majority to take the power which, as 60% of the population, they were entitled to possess. The Sunnis do not accept this. That's it for the American role. In fact American policy has been, wrongly, to do everything possible to bring Shi'a and Sunni together, and to dampen Kurdish interest in ahd hope for independence. In The New Duranty Times there was recently a report on "the old Sunni elite of Baghdad" in which the presence of a Kurd, or of a few Shi'a, as members of that old "elite," was taken as indicating the cultivated salon-culture, something prelapsarian with the presumed lapsus being Saddam Hussein, when that "Baghdad elite" was far from putting one in mind of a salon run by Mme. du Deffand. Rather, it puts one in mind of people on the margin of civilization, but one which at least they can recognize, a kind of Baghdad equivalent of earnest book-club members meeting to exchange thoughts and opinions in Bakersfield, California).
As the Americans leave, shrill cries will in chorus insist: "you can't do that" and "we broke it, we have to fix it" and "we left Iraq in ruins" and "we caused that split among Iraqis" and "we can't leave Iraq to face civil war" and so on. It is important to keep in mind, and keep reminding everyone, that Iraq today is better off than it was under Saddam Hussein, and whatever fissures are there, pre-date the existence of the United States by, in some cases, 1350 years. That should shut them up.
waterdragon52:
Thomas Friedman disagrees with you.
http://thekupfers.typepad.com/tothepoint/2005/09/thomas_friedman.html